U.S. Lets Hollywood Disable Home TV Outputs to Prevent Piracy

businessweek.com

8 points·jamesbritt··7 comments

“This action is an important victory for consumers who will now have far greater access to see recent high-definition movies in their homes,”

Tell you what else, you give me $5, I'll give you $2 and we'll celebrate the "victory" of the money you just got.

FTFA: 'Temporarily disabling the outputs will “enable a new business model” that wouldn’t develop in the absence of such anti-piracy protection, the Federal Communications Commission said today in an order.'

That seems like an awfully specious reason. If Hollywood could make my TV screen dimmer unless I signed up for a special service, that would open a new business model as well.

The new business model this enables is for-pay bittorrent and VPN sites. Because getting movies from random people on the Internet by hopping through multiple servers in multiple countries actually ends up being a better user experience than just buying it at the store.

If only I was joking...

Can anyone explain what they mean by "disabling outputs"? Perhaps I'm just not computing this right at the moment, but what exactly is this article saying is being done?

you got beaten by two minutes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329223

Funny thing, the titles are identical!

How about, "Whose hardware? FCC lets Hollywood disable the jacks on 'your' TV equipment."

(Not sure they're disabling "TV outputs" as Businessweek puts it, as most TV's don't have video out.)

I think I start to see where that sudden push to go digital came from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com